Local Fraud Gets Busted

From the News-Gazette:

URBANA – A Sullivan man has been indicted by a federal grand jury of defrauding the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs of approximately $280,000.

Robert J. Warren, 44, is tentatively scheduled to be tried in July. He was arrested Monday and appeared Tuesday in Urbana before U.S. Magistrate Judge David G. Bernthal, who released Warren pending trial.
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The 12-count indictment returned last week said that Warren served in the U.S. Navy from 1984 to 1988 and applied for veterans benefits in 2002 and social security benefits in 2004. Warren was granted V.A. benefits for being unemployable as a result of a service-connected disability and Social Security benefits for a mental impairment which caused him to be disabled.

The indictment alleges that beginning in 2002 and continuing to October 2008, Warren feigned and exaggerated various symptoms and causes of mental and physical disease and claimed he could not work around people, when in fact he worked at a tavern and was a volunteer member of the Sullivan Fire Department.

This particular story is particularly infuriating for me. A lot of the time periods for his claim are very close to my own battles with the VA and SSA. Beyond just defrauding veterans with real issues out of the money available to help them, he was using up the resources and putting more veterans further back in line to get the help they desperately needed. All the while, apparently, he was working two jobs and getting along just fine... making others wait, scrape, and suffer even longer. What a scumbag.

It's frauds like him who make it harder and harder for people with real issues to get the benefits they're entitled to. I can't help but imagine that it's cases like this that have turned both systems into a bureaucratic nightmare where every claimant is viewed with suspicion and the system becomes more and more adversarial.

But the blame isn't his alone. Both agencies involved here, the VA and the SSA, really seemed to drop the ball if they let this guy collect benefits for unemployability/disability to the tune of 280 grand. Both agencies are required to confirm income and work history for such benefits. Even short term work has to be explained in detail as to the reasons why you were unable to continue (was it due to your disability?) or how you were able to do the work even short time with your ailments (ie is intermittent severity consistent with your ailments/diagnosis).

Given the counts don't include IRS fraud of some sort, it's safe to say they didn't even bother to look for several years. Something they normally do initially and often to continue benefits.

Who suffers from this? The people who are really dependent on these programs. Not only does it take money out of an already financially strapped system, it adds new anecdotal evidence to the adversarial process to treat claimants with even more suspicion. The frauds make it harder on the folks who really need it. Hopefully his sentence will reflect who he has harmed.

(h/t: VA Watchdog.org that linked to the Chicago Tribune article on this)